Very comprehensive, very revealing.
DTES Demographic Study Final June 2008.pdf
DTES Demographic Study Final June 2008.pdf
Homelessness: June 2008 Archives
Fearing it would hurt the poor, demonstrators want proposed development quashed
VANCOUVER -- Housing activists made a last-ditch effort to derail a Downtown Eastside condominium project at a city hall hearing yesterday, claiming the development would fuel "class hatred" and make it more difficult for low-income people who live in the neighbourhood to obtain decent housing and services.
"We need some indication that there is a future for poor people in this neighbourhood - otherwise these condos are a slap in the face," Carnegie Community Action Project spokeswoman Wendy Pedersen said yesterday at a development permit board meeting.
Ms. Pedersen and other activists attended the meeting to register their objections to the 160-unit Greenwich condominium project, which developer Concord Pacific has proposed for a downtown site at 58 West Hastings St.
The area is now dominated by single-room accommodation hotels and the rough edges of Vancouver's drug trade.
Continue reading Condo project would fuel 'class hatred,' activists say.
VPD veteran says province must renovate 18 single-room occupancy hotels
Mike Howell
Vancouver Courier
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
CREDIT: Photo-Dan Toulgoet
Makeshift shelters, including Mark Tobiasson's lean-to in Oppenheimer Park, populate the Downtown Eastside.
A senior Vancouver police officer says homelessness in the Downtown Eastside is the worst he's seen in his 23 years on the job.
Supt. Warren Lemcke, commander for the north part of the city, said the dire situation won't change until the provincial government renovates the 18 single-room occupancy hotels it purchased over the last year.
Mike Howell
Vancouver Courier
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
CREDIT: Photo-Dan Toulgoet
Makeshift shelters, including Mark Tobiasson's lean-to in Oppenheimer Park, populate the Downtown Eastside.
A senior Vancouver police officer says homelessness in the Downtown Eastside is the worst he's seen in his 23 years on the job.
Supt. Warren Lemcke, commander for the north part of the city, said the dire situation won't change until the provincial government renovates the 18 single-room occupancy hotels it purchased over the last year.
Continue reading Cop calls for backup in fight against homelessness.
From The Georgia Straight
By Carlito Pablo
Publish Date: June 19, 2008
Remember Darrell Mickasko? He was the homeless man who died of burn injuries days after his clothing caught fire as he used a stove to keep himself warm one cold evening last winter. He was sleeping behind a Dumpster near a Vancouver homeless shelter that was full.
Writing in his blog on February 4, Pivot Legal Society lawyer David Eby recalled that he had seen Mickasko the week before, and that the 47-year-old Edmonton native had asked if he knew of a place he could rent. Eby didn't, and the next thing he knew, the man he considered a friend was dead.
"If people have to live outside, we're going to have more tragic deaths like Darrell Mickasko," Eby told the Georgia Straight as he raised concerns about thousands of incidents of "turnaways" from emergency shelters across the Lower Mainland.
Citing figures compiled by B.C. Housing using data from service providers, Eby said that there were more than 40,000 occasions in the Lower Mainland between April 2007 and January 2008 when people were denied access to shelters.
Continue reading Pivot Legal Society lawyer opposes ticketing homeless.
Shelter plan is unfair to hard-pressed area
Beverley Bowes
Times Colonist
Friday, June 20, 2008
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code, is the result of flawed policy and poor decision-making. Today, a Victoria neighbourhood is headed down the same slippery slope.
Practical, rather than moral, grounds were the order of the day in the early 1980s when prostitution was chased out of Vancouver's middle-class West End and Mount Pleasant districts into the Downtown Eastside. The same situation occurred in 2003 in Victoria when sex-trade workers were pushed out of the downtown core and into Rock Bay and Burnside Gorge. Along with The Stroll came the drug dealers and higher crime rates.
The neighbourhood managed to absorb the influx because it is a strong and diversified community. The area comprises light industrial, middle- to lower-income single-family dwellings and condos, transient accommodation offered by single-room-occupancy motels, pockets of executive condo developments, office buildings, subsidized housing complexes, residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities, housing for the hardest-to-house and housing for federal prison parolees.
This community is now teetering on the edge of an abyss, at the bottom of which lies a hell similar to the Downtown Eastside.
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Continue reading Victoria vs Vancouver in homeless and the poverty slide.
2nd Annual Women's Housing March
Sat June 14 @ 2 pm
Starts outside Downtown Eastside Women Centre
(302 Columbia- corner Cordova, just west of Main)
To watch the video for the march, click here
(it might say the video is unavailable--just keep trying)
On Saturday June 14 at 2 pm, join women in the Downtown Eastside Women Centre Power of Women Group in the 2nd Annual March for Women's Housing and March Against Poverty!
Continue reading 2nd Annual Women's Housing March Saturday June 14th.
